CONTRIBUTE

26 March 2011

Above, kids in the midst of some hard-core skanking at an underground ska toquin in San Bernardino, Calif., up near the mountains in the Inland Empire, Friday, February 11, 2011. I shot these photos with a disposible camera. It's all I had on me. It was so smokey and hot in there.

What is skank? Wikipedia says: "Originally, skanking consisted of a 'running man' motion of the legs to the beat while alternating bent-elbow fist-punches, left and right. Over time, however, variations have emerged across the musical world. The punk version features a sharp striking out look with the arms, and is sometimes used in moshing to knock around others doing the same."

The show got going in a warehouse behind a storefront in downtown San Bernardino, with a long line-up of IE ska bands, a 5-dollar cover, and a BOYB ground-rule that usually promotes good vibes and good skanking. The dudes in Los Rudos told me about it during an interview the night before in Riverside (more on that later!), so I went. Among the bands on the bill, some of the hardest working Latin ska bands in the IE: Cerebro Negro, Skakahuate, La Liberacion, and more.

22 March 2011

It hit me standing front-and-center before a Joy Division/Bauhaus cover band at a tucked-away little "centro cultural" (read: bar) on Bolivar in Centro, with two friends, Susana and Andreina, and Andreina's tattoo artist homies from down on Regina: Really, I could die happy right now.

Above, Joy Haus, playing all the dark-core post-punk hits, late Saturday, March 5, 2011. They played so good -- "She's Lost Control," "Bela Lugosi is Dead," "Love Will Tear Us Apart," "The Sanity Assassin" -- I coulda been in Manchester, circa 1979. In Mexico City, kids know their rock covers.

I can't find much of an Internet presence for Joy Haus, and I was hesitant to hit them up right away after their set because the singer was so, um, intense while performing. Called it a night. Felt so good the next day.

17 March 2011

Above, the trailer for the 1974 film "Earthquake," co-written by Mario Puzo and starring Charlton Heston, depicting a mega-quake destroying Los Angeles.

Buildings crumble like mud and bread, people fall dramatically to their deaths from exposed rubble, stuff falls on people and crushes them, looters get shot. I remember seeing this film when I was kid. It was terrifying back then. Right now, would I laugh watching it or go check to see if we have a fresh earthquake kit?

And now a nuclear threat. A real one. Reassessment of the nuclear power plants along the California coast line: San Onofre, Diablo Canyon. Are they ready?

The news in the United States is intensely upsetting right now. It feels like it's from another world. But no, it's here, the world we've created. Watch this Russia Today report from what appears to be West Los Angeles. Correspondent Ramon Galindo, emphasizing the words "extra precaution" over and over, asks a regular citizen named Aaron Gonzalez how he's preparing for the coming nuclear apocalypse:

Gonzalez: "I've been following several subscribers on YouTube that broke the news early, so I was able to get to Whole Foods and beat the crowd and I was able to get a hold of several bottles of the potassium iodine pills so I can distribute to my family and friends."

Galindo: "Besides the pills, have you heard of any other people taking extra precautions to prepare for a possible radioactive cloud coming this way?"

Gonzalez: "I've heard of people saran-wrapping their doors and windows, loading up on rice and grains, storing water."

Well, horray.

Then this: A Berkeley-educated geologist who claims he can predict earthquakes and says we should expect one this weekend. Jim Berkland (bio here) accurately predicted, to the day, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. He told Fox News -- where the threshold of speculative wackiness is usually very high -- that he predicts a large earthquake on the U.S. Pacific coast this Saturday, March 19. Watch here.

Berkland's evidence: schools of fish washing up dead (happened in Redondo Beach three days before the Japanese quake, and on the day in Acapulco, only the Mexican fishies were alive), animals fleeing their homes, high tides, and the spring equinox, arriving on Sunday, March 20.

When the anchor thanks Berkland for appearing on air, Berkland replies: "My pleasure, I hope."

16 March 2011

Above, a shot of an American Apparel billboard at Sunset and Alvarado in Echo Park, Los Angeles, featuring Masumi Rioja, a native and resident of Mexico City.

Masumi has a strange effect on people. I know; I've seen it in action. Hang out a little and you'll wind up dazed, invigorated, shaken up. The nature of chemistry, I guess.

I have this suspicion that recent American Apparel window displays have also been inspired by Masumi. Mannequins I've seen in L.A. and D.F. have been fixed with long black locks and lips colored deep red. Precisely Masumi's everyday look.

14 March 2011

Forgive me for indulging in a few well-worn cliches about Los Angeles; the planet's mood is certainly apocalyptic enough this week as it is. A meltdown is in progress in Japan. So driving around this city again didn't help ease the sensation that the world is snapping and crumbling around us.

Los Angeles is unsettling by its nature.

I used to laugh at the over-use of this cliche because true L.A. sophisticates know that L.A. is "more complex" or "more normal" than outsiders insist on imagining. But then I remembered, in fact, I always felt a little like this when I lived in L.A., unsettled, scrambled. The amount of time spent alone in a vehicle is really remarkable and completely alters a person's relationship to the city, its landscape, its other citizens. You're driving a deadly weapon. Depth perception becomes fuzzy.

I snapped this photo Sunday while swinging under the 110 to reach the 101, after an afternoon visiting a friend in Venice, for a quick beer at a metal fest at the Echo, before the reading in Lincoln Heights, before dinner back in Pasadena. Pasadena's chiseled streets got me lost for the first time in L.A. in years. It was frustrating.

Earlier, something about driving this freeway interchange seemed especially unfamiliar. Then I noticed. All the graffiti is gone.

08 March 2011

No Grupo, pictured above, formed in Mexico City in 1977 and were active until 1983. They did conceptual collaborative art actions, but preferred not to be called a collective. They arrived uninvited to the Paris Biennial in the form of photographic face masks, they interviewed elder artists then harpooned their work in video or performance pieces, they did mail and paper art, they "patented" the act of appreciating the taco.

An exhibit on No-Grupo is up for only days more at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. It opened in October last year and closes on March 13. I finally caught it recently. It's an exciting show because you can make an immediate parallel to the work of a similar group doing similar work at the time in Los Angeles, Asco.

No-Grupo consisted of four core artists, like Asco, three men and one woman, also like Asco, and collaborated with several transient members, again like Asco. Melquiades Herrera, Alfredo Núñez, Rubén Valencia, and Maris Bustamante (who led the taco-patenting project) made conceptual gestures that played off popular, "low-brow" culture in Mexico City. They rejected dominant norms in a stratified state-dependent art-world of the day in performances in galleries and museums. They had fun.

07 March 2011

Readers and friends have been sending along or posting some awesome photos of the experience -- guess you could say -- of getting through "Down & Delirious."

Above, Conrad is reading along studiously while at a dentist's office in New Orleans. Below, the blog Love & Hate L.A. (so good) is stuck one evening absorbing the book by candlelight. I'm blushing.

Nice to hear that Metropolis Books in downtown L.A. is carrying it. Last I was in town, a friend reported that the venerable Skylight Books on Vermont was carrying the book but had sold out -- less than a week after the title officially hit shelves.

Friends and contacts in New York, Texas, and the Bay Area have been going to Barnes & Noble (first-person confirmation here) or asking for it at local shops. Is it or isn't at the Strand in Manhattan? I'm hearing different things, but I see it on the Strand website, at a paltry eight bucks. In San Francisco, I'm stoked to hear it was "on its way" at City Lights Books, the landmark shop in Beat-central North Beach. ... I remember going there to browse while in college.

Below, photographer William Dunleavy (whose excellent work led to the photograph accompanying Chapter 11, "Originals of Punk") sent this fantastic photo of the book in a 'proper' place, at least in his homemade cosmology. It's on an altar.

Pretty amazing. Thank you, up front and right now, for all the kind and thoughtful notes of feedback I've received. I appreciate each one. Now ...

04 March 2011

The men lying under arrest in the photograph above are not dead, but, who knows, by now they could be. It's been three days since this post from Ciudad Juarez by journalist Diego Osorno has been published. In Juarez today, three days is plenty of time to possibly get killed.

Read this piece in Spanish by Froylan Enciso in a recent issue of Gatopardo. Up in a town in the Sierra Madre, up from Mazatlán, a drug-trade-related ambush during Christmas 2009 leaves at least 40 people dead, maybe up to 100, Enciso writes during a visit home.

The incident never makes it into the press. It didn't happen. I checked the federal government database on homicides this morning. For Mazatlán, only 97 homicides are reported in 2009. That doesn't sound right ...

They tell us lately "at least" 35,000 have been killed in Mexico's drug-trade violence since the governments ignited it on themselves in 2006. That can't be accurate. Just ask someone who knows better, ask Metinides. As Enciso illustrates, so many dead are not reported, so many kidnapped are never returned. We'll never know.

The "drug war" is a fiction. The violence it is inflicting on the people of Mexico is very real. It is crushing the country. I don't know about you, but I've been tired of it. Yet there's still no end in sight.

Violence stops by decriminalizing and demilitarizing the binational industry that pumps drugs into the United States. But don't expect Obama or Calderon to come to that conclusion in the blah-blah at the White House this week.

03 March 2011

Here are two fresh glasses of pulque, curado de mamey, just about an hour ago, at Bosforo in Centro. Notice the fine company: a "Vicky" and the cinnamon, to sprinkle on top. Que frescura. Just like the cranberry curado they have at Duelistas right now.

Had another liter-to-go of that yesterday.

I've been running around all day, in the nastyhotcontaminated windy spring D.F. weather, mutating me suddenly into a sufferer of allergies and sinus trouble, which has never really afflicted me before. The curse of Anahuac, perhaps. But here I am, finishing this March 3, this 2011, eager to dive into the new books I collected today from the feria de libro at Minería. More books than I can handle, than I'll ever be able to read. More books.

01 March 2011

Tonight, the world's richest man, Carlos Slim, inaugurates the new home for his private art collection, the Museo Soumaya.

President Felipe Calderon, author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and just about every art-world figurehead or related hemispheric dignitary should be in attendance for the event at Plaza Carso, in the Polanco-Irrigación region on the westside of Mexico City. The museum is certain to shift the cultural axis in Mexico, a country where state-run institutions have long dominated the art establishment and the art elite's sense of self.

That's changing. As I reported two years ago in The New York Times (link), the new Soumaya belongs to a boom of private art spaces opening in D.F. since the start of the 2000s, including leading contemporary art galleries such as Kurimanzutto, the SOMA school founded by Yoshua Okon, and the upcoming new home of the Jumex Collection, to be located just across from the street from the new Soumaya.

Slim's museum is designed by Mexican "starchitect" Fernando Romero, a Rem Koolhaas protegé. It is a shimmering "sea-sponge"-looking thing where Slim's many Rodins, Riveras, and Cezannes will be available to the general public for free, meaning no admission charges. Romero is also Slim's son-in-law. But don't get it twisted. He's really good.